Last week SWBC Bank launched SWIVEL Transactions, a new financial technology company launched from SWBC's financial transaction platform SWBC Payments, and named Jason O'Brien as CEO.
The division that would become SWIVEL was started inside SWBC around 2004 as a way to help its business customers take a payment over the phone. The product grew and evolved over time, and by 2016 the division had more than 500 clients, according to O'Brien. With further investment and new technology, the client base grew to about 830 clients. Now SWBC has spun the divion off into its own company and O'Brien discussed the future of the newly formed company.
How does SWIVEL work? You know how you go into the coffee shop, you bring out your card and you swipe it through a machine? You’re paying the coffee shop. (SWIVEL does) that for financial institutions. So you have a loan with a credit union, or a bank, and you keep your money somewhere else. Maybe you keep it at another bank. The credit union needs to get that money from you. We enable them to do that. They’re able to bring out their 'card' — they’re not doing it at a little terminal at a coffee shop, they’re going to do it through their mobile device, through technology. We help banks and credit unions and firms like that bring money from outside in.
How many financial institutions do you now serve? In terms of numbers, we are at over 830 financial institutions. We’re processing north of $7 billion a year, and we certainly see opportunities to continue growing ... We think that with our current clients we have the opportunity to give them some additional services in this domain that we’re very excited about.
How many employees do you have at the newly rebranded SWIVEL Transactions? We have 65 SWIVEL employees working on software engineering, quality assurance product management, customer support, marketing and implementation to clients. So that’s our little team. We’re really operating as a small group.
What kind of hiring plans are on the horizon for the new company? We've seen the growth of 11 roles we need to fill. And I think that the space that is the biggest opportunity — and is really our newest — is in the software engineering space. So half of our openings are in the software engineering space. (And) we've got a brand-new role that we've established and are looking to fill: the Vice President of Software Engineering. We're hiring more management in engineering, and new software engineers, junior and senior alike.
Are you remaining in the same space? We're (currently) in an office space that’s owned by SWBC, at Lockhill Selma. We have a few engineering teams for different product lines, but we’ve brought all of our SWIVELers together there, though. They may have been in different spots before, but now we’ve brought them all there. We now know that team members can work remote and that's very economical ... So what we're doing is we're working with interior architects and we're reimagining and renovating our workspace so that the priorities are inspiration, motivation and collaboration.
